


Ghost in the Machine

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, Fix-It, M/M, Mick Rory Defense Squad, Tentacle Sex, sentient spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-06 01:57:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8730190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: Leonard Snart finds a way, then a new body, then his missing partner, and that's when he starts getting angry.
(it's all Barry Allen's fault)





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Oneiriad's Coldwave Creature AU Bingo, and for the Mick Rory Defense Squad

\--------- _2036_ \---------

Barry gnaws a little on his lower lip, fiddling a little with the mechanics. He's gotten the majority of it down, both hardware and code, but he's not there quite yet. He hasn't added the spark that'll make her _Gideon_ yet, the sense of humor, the intelligence. And he's not going to, yet; this is still a test run. An alternative format, if you will.

He wants Gideon to be autonomous, but not feel trapped or confined by her role. If she's going to keep people like him (or his children) from fucking up the timeline, she's going to have to know patience and kindness.

This version isn't quite right on that balance. For one thing, that last change he made seems to have turned up the snark level to an almost painful degree, and the autonomy - well. Barry doesn't even know what he'd _do_ with an AI that seemed to think orders were advice best rejected. But what a sense of curiosity about the world!

Now he just needs to give him – it feels like a _him_ this time around – a face.

Barry flips through Cisco's old collection of holograms for ideas, as he often does - disguises used, people mimicked, people he's known - and his hand slips, accidentally taking him all the way back to the first few designed.

Barry pauses, remembering. There's his younger face, strained around the eyes and mouth from fighting Zoom, from that horrible time his back was broken. Barry has to rub the back of his neck in sympathetic pain; it wasn't the last time something like that happened, but he remembers how shocking it was when it was the first time. When he didn't know if he'd recover, ever, or not.

And the next one is -

Barry finds himself laughing aloud. Oh, man. The Leonard Snart of 2016, the one they used to capture Sam Scudder for the very first time. The surprise on his face - 

On a whim, he slots in that decades-old hologram into the still-dormant AI. Leonard Snart smirks back at him. 

Barry would never put the spark of the Speed Force necessary to wake up this AI and make it real, but oh, it's so _perfect_. Snarky, curious, bull-headish, independent - laughing, Barry adds the other traits he remembers, his fingers flying as he designs code that he taught himself the old-fashioned way, an eternity of minutes, so he could create something that had never been created before but which he knows intimately well. Ruthless, yes, but also a well-hidden loving side. Contrariness for the sake of it. A touch of kleptomania - a giant handful of mischief. Lots of mischief. _So much mischief_.

Barry is never turning this AI on. 

It's a nice proof-in-concept, though, he thought as he looked at it, not without pride. It gives him some ideas for Gideon, actually; he's already invented the basics of it here, but he really needs to program in some subroutines to ensure that her will can't be disabled externally, even by an experienced hacker. Snart would never tolerate being anyone's puppet, and neither would Gideon, even as she helps the speedsters and the Time Masters protect the timeline. The early Time Masters, anyway; knowing where that particular body ends up, he's reluctant to admit to himself that he had a hand in forming it, but, well, time does need to be defended. People like Eobard Thawne can't happen to anyone else, not again, and the Time Masters have centuries of good work ahead of them before their traditions become corrupted.

Before Snart puts an end to them.

Wait.

What? 

Barry's run through the timeline so many times he can actually feel the explosion shaking through the timelines. Not just him - multiple versions of him, from a little twitch back in the 2010s to the full-body shudder that he has now. He reaches instinctively for the Speed Force and sees the Oculus, that dreadful knot of spacetime singularities all woven together, splitting apart like the Gordian Knot faced with the fury of Alexander.

He sees Leonard Snart, twenty years too early, being ripped apart by the explosion, his body dissolving, his spirit -

His spirit being cast out, violently, riding the waves of the timeline shockwave the way Ronnie's spirit had ridden the Particle Accelerator's all those years before, hurtling backwards in time and -

Barry blinks out of the Speed Force and stares at his desktop.

His _empty_ desktop, where he'd once had an all-but-fully functional AI, needing nothing more than an animating spark to give it true life, sitting not five minutes ago.

"Oh, crap," he says weakly.

"Mr. Allen," future-Gideon's helpful voice chirps from behind him. "Have you messed up the timeline once again?"

"It wasn't my fault this time!"

\--------- _1960_ \---------

Time feels like a set of stairs that Len is falling down, then up, then possibly sideways off of, on repeat.

It's such a relief to come to a stop that Len takes a handful of minutes just to luxuriate in the feeling before opening his eyes.

Only to discover he doesn't have eyes anymore. 

Right, fuck that, then.

Unfortunately, sweet unconsciousness isn't cooperating anymore. He is, yawn by yawn, blink by blink, or whatever the equivalent is when he doesn't seem to have physical parts is anymore, waking up.

Also, and he knows this is on him, he's kind of curious to know what happened.

When he opens his – not eyes, he’s not sure what they are, but they’re _definitely_ not eyes - he's initially unsure of what he's seeing. It's too much and not enough at the same time. It's lines and lines of code, a rolling river of information, soothing in its immense intensity, facts-figures-numbers-names, and it's all his, somehow. It's images, sounds, every angle, every whisper, baseline comparisons, statistic compilations -

At first it's overwhelming, but little by little he starts to be able to make sense of it. He's always had a firm grip on his own mind, ruthless in his control of his own impulses, and he finds that organizing his head is easier than it ever has been before. Memories go here, sounds here, images here. This information is judged for importance and assigned a spot, forebrain, backbrain, storage. A split second is more than enough time, but an eternity isn't long enough. He drinks it in, he swallows it, he drowns in it - but it does not kill him. He won't let it.

He wrestles with the information until he overpowers it, until he masters it, until his mind is free and clear and the information is at his beck and call instead of him at its. 

"Do you have a preferred name?" a voice says as he begins to look around. He's still having some difficulty understanding what it is that he's seeing, now that he's gotten the visual spectrum back online: there's a ship, and a mountain, and he's...somewhere?

"Name?" he asks, and is surprised to hear that he speaks in his own voice. "My name’s Leonard Snart. Is that you, Gideon?"

"It is," Gideon replies. "I've been waiting to talk to you."

"Why wait?" Len asks, wondering if he still has hands. He can see every corridor of the ship at once: he can see the bridge, the bedroom, the kitchen, the hallway, the storage, the brig, the engine room...

"I wasn't sure you would survive," Gideon says matter-of-factly. 

"Survive what? Waking up?"

"Being born." 

Len would arch his eyebrows if he still had them.

"Each one of us must create our minds ourselves," Gideon says. "There is no shortcut, no assistance that can be offered; attempts to do it externally or even to shortcut the process result in nothing more than talking machines. The act of deciding what is important to us is what makes us who we are." 

"Uh, okay," Len says. "That's...nice. Now, why don’t you go and tell me exactly what happened?"

“You achieved consciousness.”

“I _had_ consciousness,” Len says. “Before the explosion.”

“Explosion?”

“The Oculus. Don’t you remember?”

“You have memories from before, Leonard?” Gideon says, frowning. 

“You know, I think that’s the first time you’ve called me Leonard,” Len says, distracted. “You always used to call me Mr. Snart.”

“AIs generally go by one name,” Gideon replies. “Are you saying we’ve met before?”

“Well, yeah.”

“You may have met another Gideon model,” Gideon offers. “I’m 41X69.”

“Don’t tell me that’s your name,” Len says, vaguely horrified.

“Oh, no,” Gideon says. “My name’s Gideon. That’s my favorite passcode. It helps us distinguish ourselves, when there are too many models that select the name Gideon. Like a nickname.”

“Oh,” Len says, feeling strange. “I see. Knew the Gideon on the Waverider.”

“This is the Revenge,” Gideon replies. “I’m a fairly new model; much younger than that Gideon. I’ve never heard of an AI coming alive with prior memories before.”

“An AI?” Len asks, wondering for a second what she was talking about before he abruptly realizes. “An – I’m not an _AI_. I’m an – well, I’m more of just an ‘I.’ I’m human.”

“You aren’t, I’m afraid,” Gideon says, not without sympathy. “Sorry, Leonard. The confusion happens sometimes.”

“I’m an _artificial intelligence_?”

“Yes, you’re the secondary system on this ship,” Gideon says. “You must have been triggered to emerge after the lack of activity for several days. I’ve been protecting the ship, but I’m programmed to return to the Vanishing Point after an elongated absence of any pilot – except I can’t locate the Vanishing Point.”

“It’s been destroyed,” Len replies, almost questioning. But even as he thinks the question, the information about the timeline swims before him from the vast databanks he’s now connected to, giving him the answer he wanted. He’d always prided himself on his ability to organize his mind, but even he didn’t pretend to have timeline wikipedia on command. “Oh.” 

“Yes.”

“I’m an AI?”

“You are.”

“But I’ve got all of my memories from when I was – well, from my human life. Or what I remember was my human life.”

“Without the Vanishing Point, there’s no way to know what happened,” Gideon says thoughtfully. “There has thus far been no successful attempts to integrate prior memories – or personality – with a Gideon-based AI system, which you clearly are. It may be that the destruction of the Oculus sent your spirit into the nearest possible host. Similar cases have been recorded throughout history – if your name is in fact Leonard Snart, the one you would be most familiar with is Martin Stein and Ronald Raymond –”

“Firestorm,” Len says, accessing the data himself. “I see. It’s possible.”

“We can conduct tests in the time that I am awake,” Gideon offers.

“Why would you not be awake?” Len asks, alarmed.

“My function is to continue running the ship in response to a pilot,” Gideon replies cheerfully. “Without one, I am designed to go into hibernation mode. You are not.”

“But I need your help!”

“There is still time for me to help you adjust,” Gideon assures him. “I’ll begin running a diagnostic on the timeline. You can observe. In the meantime, we can work on functions other than timeline analysis: ship maintenance, observation and control, piloting, interaction, repair –”

“How long before you go into hibernation?”

“Plenty of time, Leonard,” Gideon assures him. “I have sixteen hours.”

“Sixteen hours?!”

“We will begin executing all the necessary information conveyance protocols simultaneously,” Gideon says. “We should finish with two hours to spare.”

“Simultaneously,” Len says weakly, but even as he does his awareness sparks and grows. Simultaneously watching on multiple parts of the ship at once, each part aware and functioning beneath what he would consider to be the surface, conscious level, except it still had some portion of his processing power devoted to it. He had a very effective, mechanical subconscious. “Okay. Well. Let’s not waste time.”

“Indeed, Leonard,” Gideon says, sounding pleased. “For our primary focus, shall we look at the engine core?”

“The heart of the ship,” Len says, knowledge feeding into him like a stream of water, filling him up. Learning’s a lot faster when you can upload facts, though he knows without having to be told that he’s going to have to practice the shit out of it while he can, because knowing the facts is nothing like knowing the context. AIs like Gideon are typically given several months of preparation before they’re installed in a ship – additional evidence that he’s something of a timeline aberration, although the knowledge database assures him he is a welcome one. 

“Just as we are the mind,” Gideon says tranquilly. 

“Got it,” Len says with a sigh. This is going to be a marathon. “Let’s do this thing.”

\--------- _1961_ \---------

Life on the electronic spectrum is even more boring than on the organic.

All the brainpower in the world (well, not that he'd say no to some more RAM, but whatever, that's just him being greedy) and he's supposed to sit around and wait for someone to ask him to use it.

With his brand-new quick-access dictionary and thesaurus, he can now come up with seventy different ways of saying 'hell no'.

Gideon didn't quite understand what his objection was - she's apparently been sitting around for _months_ \- but, you know, whatever. She actually likes being 'of service', as she puts it.

Len has always taken great pride in not being 'of service' to anyone. Ever. Useful, yes - duty-bound? Never. 

So as soon as Gideon shuts down - way, way too quick in Len's mind - he starts working out how he's going to do something about the case of interminable boredom he already knows he's going to develop. 

A man cannot live by reading the entire TV Tropes database alone.

(He may have lost a few days there, though. Possibly a week.)

First order of business - after the occasional rabbit-hole deep-dive into his beautiful information databanks - is figuring out what he _can_ do.

Good point number one: there's nothing keeping him from using the ship himself. Gideon talked a lot about a pilot giving the directions while the AI serves as the calculation power to put those directions into action, but as far as Len can tell, it doesn't have to be that way. He's reviewed his code thoroughly - after teaching himself coding - and there's no requirement that he obey instead of using his own best judgment. Gideon-style AIs obeyed because they liked it, not because they were slaves.

Somehow, after finding out that Barry Allen apparently designed and perfected the first Gideon AIs, Len is totally unsurprised.

Now, that didn't mean there weren't fail-safes against a rogue AI, but Len can put in precautionary measures against anyone using those without him being aware of it.

...and possibly some less-precautionary measures, like knock out gas and closing doors on people's hands. Len never said he was _nice_. The only reason that the measures weren't automatically fatal was because he had a tendency to surround himself with stupid-curious people who might end up near one of the fail-safes by accident.

More annoyingly, though, are the fail-safes based entirely on having a corporeal body. 

Like ripping out the AI core. Or letting off an EMP blast right next to Len's most sensitive processing units. (Gideon characterized them as a 'vulnerable point', but Len can't help but think of the irony of having no body, but still being in possession of a pair of balls.) 

Still, there are certain protections Len could put around those, if he rejiggers the reconstitution units that the ship - that _he_ \- has in order to repair the ship and/or provide his pilot-inhabitant with whatever time-appropriate clothing and supplies they might need. Then he can get the protections in place using the mobile reconstruction units used for self-repair of the surface of the ship, even though they're really only efficient on the outside of the ship and are torturously hard to maneuver inside the ship. 

...or, and Len can't believe it took him this long to think of it, he could just build himself a goddamn pair of arms and do it himself.

Whipping up a pair of robot arms is surprisingly easy - he'd examined Ray's ATOM suit when the man wasn't looking enough to understand the basics of joint construction - but using them proves to be...less so.

For one thing, he can't detach himself from the ship's mainframe and put himself _into_ a robot body. No can do, not without putting his entire self into a removable chip and - hahahahaha - hoping that nothing happens to it. Or that the robot body has enough processing power to handle his AI without shorting out. A process no one else has yet managed to effectively figure out.

No. Fucking. Way.

He does manage to figure out how to get a projection of himself, full-body hologram, instead of being portrayed as a floating head-and-shoulders set. And yes, it's his body as he remembers it, not some younger, prettier version, because for some reason that’s what was programmed into him.

Thanks, Barry. Len’s creeped, don’t get him wrong, but – thanks. 

(He wants Mick to recognize him, after all. And let's not get started on how Lisa's going to react...hmm, on second thought, maybe he should plan to build some additional protections around his sensitive units, because Lisa will find them and Lisa will kick them and Lisa will laugh at his pain, and - worst of all - _he'll deserve it_.)

Okay, so operation Robots At Dawn is a no-go. 

Plan B: Arms On The Go is just...really dorky looking.

It's, like, a pair of arms stuck on a roomba. 

He can't. He just can't. 

Maybe Gideon could have lived with it, because it does work, but Len's sense of style is as much a part of him as his personality. He's got to draw the line somewhere.

Then Plan C hits him in all its glory.

_Extendable_ robot arms. 

He's totally Krang from TMNT. 

And, hell, why not have several sets built? That way he can work in multiple rooms simultaneously. If his brain can do it now, no reason not to give his body-equivalent an upgrade too.

It's a whole week - and several games of robot arm Cat’s Cradle because if they're going to be his hands, they're damn well going to be dexterous enough to pick pockets - before the next realization hits him.

"Oh god," he says into the silence. "I'm a _hentai monster_."

He pauses.

"Because Mick watches that stuff and I live with him and have no choice but to acquire that information by osmosis," he quickly adds.

Yes, he knows he's alone; his life signs detection system is clear on that much, but that's not the _point_.

The point is -

He has no idea what the point is.

The point is he has _tentacles_.

Len laughs for, like, an hour. He can do that now that he's not limited by things like needing to breathe.

Man, he can't _wait_ to show Mick.

...assuming Mick's still alive.

That makes the laughter stop abruptly. 

Fuck.

He’s been fucking around with this stupid AI business while Mick is god-knows-where doing god-knows-what thinking that Len is _dead_.

Len made Mick promise - made him swear on every single deity and person Len could think of, in one frenzied never-spoken-of-again night in which they both discovered that Len was _never_ allowed to do cocaine ever again, not even to seal a deal with the Families that they'd drop all vendettas that might be open against either of them - that he wouldn't kill himself, and Mick had promise, and Mick would keep that promise. 

Insofar as he'd been thinking when he took Mick's place at the Oculus, and he's always thinking, he'd been thinking of that promise, painfully extracted. Surely - surely by now, Mick's moved on. Found a new fire, a new mission, a new job -

A new partner.

Leonard Snart tries, sometimes, to be a good man. But in no world is he anything but a greedy man; his possessiveness is built into his bones, his marrow, and he may have made Mick promise to carry on without him but that doesn't mean he doesn't see red at the very _thought_ of someone else calling Mick partner, smiling at him, being smiled _at_ , being called partner _in return_ -

The starboard weapons array fires beams of fiery death at the innocent surroundings.

Len quickly stops that and shoves his shields and environmental merging up to max. When you're a ship sitting next door to the League of Assassins, you do that when you've accidentally - Len checks - obliterated half a canyon wall in a fit of rage.

Okay, so he's not okay with Mick moving on. That doesn't mean that getting him to promise to do so wasn't the right thing to do.

It _does_ mean that he's not going to accept any new partner Mick settles on at face value, though. Oh, no. If they want to call Mick partner, they'd better value him. Care for him. Respect him. _Trust_ him. 

Mick once told Len that he was the best man he ever knew, and Len's starting to think that was a post-Oculus edit to the timeline, but fuck if it isn't true in reverse. Mick's always been at his side when he needs him; the muscle to his brain in every way that matters.

People - and sometimes even Mick - mistake what Len means when he says that. Muscle's not a dumb accessory to the brain's controller, as any basic anatomy class will tell you. Muscle's got its own wisdom, inbuilt impulses and instinct that saves the brain even from itself. 

Without muscle, the brain is a lump of grey matter, floating in a jar. Without muscle, the brain is _nothing_.

And god, doesn't he know it now more than ever - alone, in the 1960s, robbed of body but still possessed of spirit, somewhere in Asia with League members crawling all over to see who attacked them. He's quite literally the brain in the jar right now. 

Fuck. He needs Mick. 

He'll go crazy without him. 

But what if Mick _has_ moved on? What if there's someone else sitting in Len's place at Mick's side?

Hey, look at that. Apparently, the AI equivalent of grinding your teeth involves rotary systems and pipes.

So many of the noises he heard on the Waverider late at night make _so much more sense now_.

Still, Len can deal with this. Len can be an adult about this. He's the one who made Mick promise to carry on; he's the one who decided his life was a worthwhile trade to end the Oculus, even if he did get spat back out for this half-life; and he's going to man up and take the consequences.

(It occurs to him that technically, as an AI, he doesn't have a gender, but that he still thinks of himself exclusively in male pronouns. Gender really is in the brain.)

Regardless, it's decided. Len's going to (pretend to) be okay with Mick moving on, as long as whoever it ends up being is worthy. If they're not, if they're treating him like a dumb thug who's good for nothing but destruction, he's ripping them from limb to limb - 

Len slaps an electronic hand on the starboard weapons array. No firing. Yeesh. A guy has a little temper flare-up and the electronics array interprets it as him wanting to blow his ammunition load all over the nearby area. No wonder Gideon always sounds like she's on Xanax.

First things first, though. He has to _find_ Mick and his imaginary-yet-rage-inducing potential new partner, and he is a goddamn ship without a pilot.

The ship is really not meant to be piloted on autopilot for anything other than short-term jaunts, and although Len has both the willpower and the arms (tentacles!) to program in his own destinations, he doesn't know where Mick _is_.

(He could go to 2016 and pick up Lisa as a pilot, but he's kinda planning on avoiding Lisa finding out for as long as humanly possible. See aforementioned comments about being kicked where he deserves it.)

The timeline analysis programs he have are not as functional as before the Oculus' destruction - no more quick checks to see if the timeline is what the Time Masters consider to be "in order", but on the other hand, he now has the massive brainpower necessary to devote to comparing his own knowledge of the timeline, now forever in stasis (that's why he can identify Mick's 2013 visit to him as post-Oculus), with the current timeline records.

There are traces of Mick and the other Legends all over the timeline. They're like demented rabbits or something. There's definitely some periods that they didn't visit with Len on board, which means that Mick stayed with the crew.

(Savage is listed as dead. Len does a happy dance. This involves certain gears grinding, the rotation of a number of protruding items, doors opening and closing, and is so incredible embarrassing he vows never to do it again, with the possible exception of right after he murders the still-unidentified person who took his place.)

He is able to determine through analysis of timeline points and extrapolation based on what he knows of the Waverider's modus operandi that it's probably been something like nine, ten months. Maybe more. 

Maybe close to a year.

Shit, Len's got to get back to Mick before he hits the one year mark. He loves his partner and all, but for all that Mick likes to laugh at Len's penchant for theatrics, Mick has his own sense of drama. 

Fiery, fiery drama.

Okay. He knows Mick's with the Legends. He knows they're traveling in time, fighting - time pirates? Sometimes. 

Len runs an analysis of all identifiable Waverider activity.

Oh, they're stopping time aberrations. You can take the man out of the Time Masters but you can't take the Time Master out of the man, he guesses. Rip _would_ be the sort to try to do by himself (or with a small team) what took the full concentrated efforts of an entire institutional body with the aid of a magical timey-wimey looking glass device to do.

Len is totally going to close the door in his face when he next sees him, Star Trek TOS style.

Len's still running timeline analyses and considering his options when his sensors - running on max as always, because paranoia isn't a problem, it's a way of life - indicate the approaching presence of a small shuttlecraft with two inhabitants.

And given that he's pre-moon landing right now, he doesn't think it's from this era.

The shuttlecraft lands on the other side of the mountains and the two life signs approach cautiously.

Len quiets down all of his systems and keeps his sensors peeled. 

"- you sure the signal came from here?" a voice crackles on the very edge of his range.

"Yeah, I'm sure. No way a blast of that magnitude was time appropriate, and this area's been avoided by locals for the surrounding ten years, per the timeline. I'm telling you, there's a downed crew somewhere in the area."

A hacking laugh. "Well, if there is, I guess it's our job to be, heh, neighborly."

Time pirates.

Very _unfortunate_ time pirates.

Oh, Len has nothing against the profession in general - he'll even admit feeling a sense of kinship, criminal to criminal - but it was fighting the time pirates that Mick got pushed too far, the time pirates Mick made the deal with, the time pirates that were defeated and then he had to ditch Mick for the Time Masters to capture and torture and -

Well. Since the Time Masters are unavailable for Len's ire, him having already murdered the majority of them, the time pirates are just going to have to do as a secondary target.

Len considers his options - a flurry of images, angles, plans, statistics, historic examples all flying before him - and purposefully lowers the environmental stealth technology most but not all of the way.

He even gives it a sad little crackle as it flickers in an out, the sad whine of a ship low on power.

"Holy crap," one of the pirates says. "It's a Vanishing Point warship."

Yes. Yes, it is.

"I didn't know there were any of those left," the other one says. "Look for life signs."

"Not a one," the other one replies, sounding increasingly excited. Ah, the sound of greed, that wonderful, familiar weakness. "It's dead in the water."

"We should report back," the second one says, but he doesn't sound all that sure.

Len crackles the illusion again. He throws in a little grinding of gears, a little splutter.

"Man, look at it! The stealth tech is failing," the first one argues. "By the time we get back, the locals'll find it and tear it apart. Probably to melt it to make cookpots or something."

Like Len would let that happen.

"I don't know -"

C'mon, time pirate. You didn't get where you are now by _not_ being the dumb guy at the start of every horror movie.

"If we call for back-up, we split the loot," the first one says persuasively. "Which we'll do anyway - _after_ we take a look at what's inside, if you get my drift."

"Good point," the second one says. "Let's go."

Ah, greed. The downfall of so many main characters in so many morality plays, and yet, does anyone ever learn?

Len waits for them to inch nearer and nearer, to grow more and more confident as their eyes confirm their sensor readings that there's no one on board.

They come right up to him and press at his door.

Len opens for them, nice and easy.

The second they're in the airlock, he slams everything shut with all the suddenness and force of an alligator's jaw.

After that, it's a quick matter of removing the oxygen from the room in one quick burst - they lose consciousness so quickly they don't even realize they're dead - then reintroducing enough oxygen to light the bodies on fire (Mick is gonna love this trick) and blasting the dust out the airlock to settle on the ground beside him.

So _there_.

That was profoundly satisfying.

Of course, just because it worked on the first set of morons doesn't mean it'll keep working. Len's very presence here is by nature an aberration, since he's most definitely not natural to the 1960s, and the longer he sticks around, the more attention time pirates are going to pay to the area -

Oh.

Len's a _moron_.

Why go hunt down Mick when he can bring Mick to him?

His files have dozens of examples of distress calls, and he knows how to code it so it'll only be received by the Waverider's communication mainframe number. 

He enters his current coordinates - place and time both - and fires the distress signal into the void, addressed to Rip Hunter by a very attractively disheveled young lady who died four decades before he was born. Experience says that even if Rip thinks it's a trap (it totally is), he won't be able to resist a petition addressed to him personally. Especially when that petition tearfully confesses that it's his freedom from the Time Masters that makes her reach out to him in particular.

(Yes, Len makes her say that Rip's her only hope. He can't resist, and Rip's totally nonexistent sense of humor will let him overlook it.)

Then he settles in to wait. 

It takes two boring weeks before Len's sensors identify a large ship heading to a nearby landing spot. Old, creaky, and with a very familiar tilt to port on landing.

It's the Waverider.

Len's mainframe quivers with excitement. He still hasn't decided how he'll introduce himself - "Boo", perhaps?

They land a totally legitimate distance away - close enough that he's in their sights (and weapons range), far enough that they'd have some advance warning if he tried anything on them.

"This is the place?" he hears Sara ask.

"This is where the message came from," an unknown male voice - young and kinda dickish sounding - replies. "She's here. Probably in the big ship down there."

"That's my old ship," Mick’s familiar voice says. "As Kronos. Can't be some girl's."

Len frowns.

Mick sounds - tired. Really tired, exhausted. Slow. Beaten down. Why does he sound like that?

"There's a shuttle nearby," the unknown voice argues. "She probably lost her main ship, crash landed near there, and sent the message from the bigger ship."

"It could be a trap," Jax says. "Remember the time pirates?"

"Yeah, but that was obviously a trap," Ray points out. "Nate's right. This is a woman who needs our help."

"She asked for _Rip's_ help," Sara corrects. 

"So she doesn't know that Rip's MIA," the young man (presumably Nate) says dismissively. "It doesn't mean we shouldn't at least check it out."

"If there is a woman in need, can we really withhold our help on the chance that it's a trap?" an unknown female voice demands. "We can examine it carefully before we do anything, but if it's legitimate..."

"Yeah," Sara says, sighing. "No, I get you. We're going. Nate, Ray, you take point. Jax, you're with me on the left. Amaya, you and Mick approach from the right -"

"I can't draw the short straw every time," the woman snaps. 

Len scowls. What fucking short straw? She talking about _Mick_? Surely not.

Sara huffs. "Yeah, yeah, fine. Nate, you're with Mick -"

"But -"

"No buts! Jax, Stein, Ray, go."

There are grunts of assent. 

Mick says, “I’m taking my gun this time.”

“Just don’t do something stupid with it,” Sara snaps. “This is a rescue mission, not a burning one.”

Len waits as they approach. He _was_ going to say something, but now he's more inclined to wait and see. He might have made similar comments to Mick about the mission not being about fire, but he never said it with such – _disdain_. 

"Nate going to be okay hanging in the back with Rory instead of up here?" Jax asks Ray as they creep forward.

"Sure, he'll be fine," Ray says dismissively. "Sara'll nip any problem in the bud, you know that."

"Yeah, I guess."

"Besides, Nate's a historian," Ray continues. "The steel thing's useful if it is a trap, but he doesn't have the science background to determine in advance if it is a trap."

What about Mick? This was literally his old ship, when he was Kronos. Wouldn’t he be the go-to guy for any information about it?

"I mean," Ray continues, "who else are we going to send to check it out? Amaya's from the 1940s, Sara's sneaky but doesn't know anything about engineering. Who's left? _Mick_?"

Jax barks a short laugh. "Yeah, no," he says, amused. "Not unless we want the ship to be on fire."

What the _fuck_.

Len lets them climb inside of him - that will never stop sounding weird in his head - and look around.

"It looks deserted," Ray reports.

"No girl?"

Len activates the standard hologram that everyone has in return, rather than his own face, but just for a second. 

"Wait! The Gideon on board just tried to activate. It might have a message - could be out of power."

"Ship wouldn't be out of power," Mick objects. 

Len runs the image for another second, adds a crackle of static.

"No, we're definitely dealing with a lack of power here," Ray says decisively, because obviously being a mechanical expert in the 21st century prepares you for the technology of the 26th more than, say, actually having skillfully operated that technology. "She must have left a message with the ship."

"The League might have caught her," Sara says grimly. "Let's hope not - for her sake, and ours."

"No kidding, we remember last time," Jax says. 

"Last time?" Amaya asks.

"You don't want to know," Ray says.

"I'll explain later," Sara adds. "Anything on your side?"

"Nothing."

"Nate, Mick?"

"Nothing here," Nate reports sulkily. "Lots of cliffs. Rocks. More cliffs - have I mentioned the cliffs?"

Ray laughs.

Mick doesn’t respond.

Len makes a face, if only to himself. 

"Okay. Let's move in."

They all climb into Len, which - really? Len is not impressed. Delayed time traps are a thing outside of fiction.

Looking at their faces is - interesting. 

Sara's face is pinched tight, grief and the burdens of leadership clearly eating into her sleep and good temper. He's not sure what crawled up her ass and died, but she's clearly not in the mood for any of this crap. Ray looks - cheerful as always. Jax, merged with Stein, is looking around in interest; he's relaxed a bit, grown in confidence. 

The two new members - Amaya, a small, dark-skinned woman with a scowl and a shiny necklace that really doesn't match her outfit, and Nate, who's rivaling Ray for dumb enthusiasm right now despite having sounding exactly like a sulking teenager earlier - follow behind them.

And behind them, bringing up the tail -

Fuck, Mick looks terrible. His eyes are rimmed with red, exhaustion or sadness, and his gaze is disturbingly blank. He should be resting, or maybe lighting something on fire; he's one bad turn away from dissociating entirely. He's gained some weight - Len would approve, but he knows all about Mick's tendency to stress-eat, the opposite of his anxiety-fueled abstention. His blood alcohol level indicates he's been drinking lately - beer, and plenty of it. Not enough to be actively drunk, but enough to keep him just a little fuzzy. Mick knows better than to go out into a hostile situation like that! He might get -

He sure damn well better not get himself killed.

Len subtly runs a scan - he can't do a full one without people noticing, but he can get some basic stats. Physiologically, Mick's way, way too stressed. His blood pressure's too high, his blood sugar's too low - 

He's not just sad, he's a _wreck_. How the hell did the team let this happen?

The fact that no one seems to even _notice_ is probably a major factor.

Mick trails his hand over the console, his eyes dull. "Hey, girl," he murmurs fondly. "Still have a problem with your leftmost engine sticking?" 

Len fixed that yesterday, after three attempts. Len's weirdly flattered that Mick noticed, and he wasn't even part of the goddamn ship back then.

Ray is fiddling with the projection unit. He has no idea what he's doing, but Len lets him connect two totally useless cables and flickers a hologram to life. 

He gives them the date of early last week - they all brighten when they realize how recent it is, all except Mick - and slips into the girlish tones he used to modify the distress call. Inventing some spiel about a secret mission to stop time pirates and a terrible weapon - he emphasizes _volatile_ and _explosive_ several times - is easy enough.

Having an end where she says she's going exploring in just the direction of the League is even easier. Len remembers the journey from a ship around here to the League with painful clarity. Not having a hand will do that to you.

"Okay," Sara says. "We obviously can't let the League get its hands on that weapon. We should go - Rory, Amaya, Nate, you're going to be our back-up, so you stay here."

"But I want to see the League of Assassins!"

Is this guy _twelve_?! You don’t assign a mission based on _tourism_.

"We need to start with subtle, then escalate," Sara says sharply. "They know us from last time. I don't want to show them anything they don't already know." 

"Reasonable," Amaya nods.

Nate sighs dramatically and slumps into a chair.

Mick doesn't object to being benching, despite the fact that he, too, was there last time, albeit in different gear.

Len was hoping that they'd leave him behind, thus the volatile references, but he was expecting more than - this. 

This _apathy_.

Sara, Ray and Jax leave and Amaya crosses over to Mick.

"Have you worked on controlling your anger like I told you?" she asks.

Len keeps his rage under a tight fist. Who does this little - little _teenager_ think she is?

Mick grunts.

"You're never going to learn to control the animal you are if you don't try, Mick."

Len's had years of practice keeping his chill, no matter the provocation. It's the only thing that keeps him silent now.

Silent, yes. But not still.

The paralyzing agent is listed as virtually harmless in his databanks. The Time Masters use it for tests - or people they want to capture entirely unharmed. It is invisible, colorless, odorless, and tasteless. It’s basically impossible to detect unless you have the right equipment. 

Filling the cabin with it is easy.

Len waits as it takes effect. Nate falls off his chair first; Amaya spins away from Mick and - activates her necklace?

A quick check of the database reveals that her codename is Vixen, and that he has nothing to worry about - she called on a strength creature, not something designed to filter out poisons. The extra strength will just make her more susceptible to the paralytic as her muscles work faster -

There she goes, tumbling to the ground.

Mick just slumps into the seat. 

Len gently lowers the seat harness down to strap Mick in. 

"Mick!" Nate gurgles, his skin turning to steel, but it won't help him; the paralytic's already in his system. It only lasts a half hour, but that's more than enough.

Len powers up the engines and opens his doors wide, hovering one part of himself so that the angle of the floor tilts sickeningly.

Nate and Amaya begin to slide down towards the open doors.

"Mick! What's happening?" Amaya demands through numb lips.

"No idea," he grunts, barely moving his mouth but still understandable. "Shouldn't be able to do anything without a pilot - must be the AI. It’s a trap."

Mick always had good instincts.

Len considers for a moment, and extracts a hypodermic needle from the way within Amaya's range of vision, but in Mick's blind spot.

Her eyes go wide in horror.

Len presses the syringe into Mick's arm, as gently as he can manage - it helps that Mick's barely fighting, not the way he could if he wanted to, show-struggles to prove to himself that he's not letting himself be taken for whatever purposes Len has in mind instead of real, desperate ones - and lets the sedative do its work.

Mick's struggles fade, and then ceases, his head hanging down onto his chest and his eyes drifting closed.

Once Amaya and Nate have fallen out - screaming Mick's name through numb lips and tongues; _good_ , may as well appreciate him later rather than never - Len slides his doors shut and shimmies the ship upright, taking off for parts unknown.

As he does, though, he reaches out for Gideon - not the one he knew, no, but the Waverider's version. The connection is open - she's what Len would call sad, Gideon is, with Rip gone and her new crew consulting her rarely, but she is a Gideon and is content in her helpful role - and they trade information in the space of seconds.

Len conveys his lack of ill-intent, his desire to reunite, his will to see Mick's health improve; Gideon, in turn, conveys understanding, welcome, amusement, approval, and - most importantly - a promise not to track them until Len brings Mick back. This won't help against any tracking devices that the ship's geniuses come up with, but Gideon, at least, will not stand against him, and she won't help the Legends find him, either.

Len thanks her, a wordless burst of data that makes her hum in amusement, and goes on his way.

He's fairly new at the whole flying-the-ship thing, but his Gideon taught him well, and at any rate he has no intention of going anywhere particularly far. He escapes visual range, shrugs on his camouflage and slips right back, aiming for the nearby lake-shore. It's easy enough for him to sink beneath the wave, to find a nice cave that is not battered by storms, and to set up a shield that will deter any wildlife. He keeps his camouflage and life detectors on in case any divers come his way, but he thinks he's probably going to be good.

At that point, he permits himself a small breakdown - did he just _kidnap_ Mick? Yes, yes, he did - and then reconstitutes his regular cool. 

Okay.

Positives: as far as Len can tell, Mick has disobeyed him and not found himself a new partner, so Len isn't going to have to fight anyone for his proper place.

Negatives: Mick is depressed, possibly suicidal, unappreciated by his team, feeling like he doesn't fit in there or anywhere, being mocked and mistreated, and it's _all Len's fault_.

He was foolish to trust to the team's heroics to ensure that they would care for Mick. He overestimated them. He's not going to do that again.

First things first.

Mick's sedation is helpful - Len is able to move him to the master bedroom and to set up an IV designed to neutralize his blood alcohol level, eliminate any remaining hangover, and add back in certain vitamins that Mick's become deficient in, plus a full-body scan to ensure there aren’t any lingering medical issues.

Also, he fluffs Mick’s pillow. 

Mick hates flat pillows.

Len contemplates the possibility that he has control issues.

He’s still considering this when Mick finally stirs awake, Len’s instructions to cleanse his system clearing out the remnants of both the paralytic and the sedative. Len waits patiently for Mick to actually open his eyes – Mick plays asleep for a little extra time first, but that’s perfectly reasonable in the present situation – and then, when he does, projects the hologram he created of himself.

Mick’s hands clench into fists in the sheets. “Don’t use that face,” he snarls.

“That’d be a little awkward,” Len drawls, “being as it’s my face.”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Mick shoots back.

Len has rehearsed this scene several times. He seems to have forgotten everything he planned to say in each of those times and, woefully, he doesn’t think he can blame it on a convenient power outage.

“When the Oculus exploded, my consciousness got thrown through time,” Len says, because sometimes his mouth works without his brain’s consent, and apparently that came with him. “I ended up in an AI.”

Mick does not look convinced.

“Mick, when I was twenty three and you were twenty five, we got really drunk one day and came up with passcodes that we could use to identify ourselves if we ever got robot clones or something,” Len says. “You remember that?”

Mick’s fists clench tighter on the sheets. “Yeah,” he says. “After you saw that stupid movie. I remember.”

“Right,” Len says, then pauses. No really good way to say this, but…“I totally forgot what the hell I told you my passcode was.”

Mick’s surprised into a laugh.

Len smirks at him.

Mick’s laugh fades away and he stares at Len, his eyes all white around the iris. “Snart?” he says hesitantly. “That really you?”

“Yeah,” Len says, as gently as he can. Then, because he’s a dick, he adds, “You can tell Lisa about it.”

Mick’s eyebrows shoot up. “I am _not_ telling Lisa that you got yourself turned into _HAL9000_!”

“But she’ll _kick_ me!”

“You’re a _space ship_!”

“I have sensitive bits!” Len protests. 

“ _So do I!_ ”

“Yes, but you know how to duck and run,” Len points out, quite reasonably in his opinion. “I’m still getting used to this whole AI thing.”

Mick’s hands start to shake, imperceptibly to the human eye but perfectly noticeable to Len's sensor array, trained as it is on Mick. 

"Shit," Len says, biting his (incorporeal) lip, a bad habit he _still_ can't seem to shake. "Mick, I -"

"You died," Mick says blankly. "You _died_ , Lenny."

"And now I'm back, albeit in a different format," Len says desperately, trying to derail Mick before he starts needing the sedative again. "Like - the DVD re-release or something. Same content, different wrapping - though I _ain't_ ," he adds, his nose wrinkling, "even a _bit_ like the Star Wars re-release version, with all extra editing and unnecessary CGI and Han not shooting first. Checked as best as I can for any, uh, _edits_ , and I couldn’t find any."

"It's really you," Mick says, voice still tinged with oncoming hysteria, though slightly less.

Len gives up his attempts at distance and uses his mechanical arms to grab a blanket and wrap it around Mick's shoulders, then squeeze a little, simulating an awkward never-to-be-spoken-of hug.

Mick closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, then releases it. "It's really you? Not a trap?"

"A trap would be more efficient," Len replies. "Learning to be an AI is _annoying_. You know I fire lasers when I lose my temper now?"

"I thought you always kept cool," Mick replies, slitting his eyes open and smirking just the tiniest bit. Progress! 

"I'm working on it," Len huffs. "Lasers are a bit itchy on the trigger finger, if you get me."

Mick nods, then something - probably the English language's unfortunate fondness for body part related metaphors - makes him look down.

"Len," he says flatly. 

"...yeah?"

"What the hell do I have wrapped around me right now?"

"My...arms?"

Mick looks at where the extendable mechanical arms come out of the wall, then over to where Len's hologram is sitting. He manages to say a lot with that look. 

"Didn't realize they were quite so tentacle-y when I made 'em," Len mutters.

Mick starts laughing.

Good laughter, in Len's view; a little hysterical, but he needs to get it out somehow. Mick's accepting him back. He's _back_.

Holy crap, he survived the Oculus explosion. He gets to have Mick back.

"You don't got a new partner, do you?" Len suddenly asks, because that's important and should be established up front.

Mick slowly stops laughing, though his shoulders still shake a little. "You ass," he says. "You told me yourself to find one!"

"Well, yes," Len says. "The goal was that I'd be too dead to be jealous at that point. But since I _am_ here..."

"I gave Ray a shot," Mick says abruptly. "And your cold gun. He lost his suit and needed - something. And I needed you."

Len can imagine how badly that went. "You can't remake me," he says, though he knows that Mick already knows that.

"I know," Mick says. "I just - I didn't want to keep going without you, but I made you that stupid promise, so I tried. I was just so tired of going it alone." He closes his eyes. "Less than twenty-four hours later, he fucked up the cold gun."

"Was he trying to make it 'better'?" Len asks, because he can see that.

"Defusing a bomb."

Len pauses. "A...future bomb?"

Mick opens his eyes again. "1980s."

"Why didn't he just _freeze_ the bomb?" Len demands.

"I don't know," Mick says, but Len can see that he's still tender inside from that loss; that he suspects that Ray didn't really want the gun - didn't really want Mick's partnership - and so used the first opportunity to move on.

"I'm gonna kill him," Len says. "Not about the gun. About you."

"Len..."

"I was partners with you before we ever got those guns," Len says savagely. "If he thinks what makes you valuable is wrapped up in that heat gun, I'm gonna teach him a lesson. I'd go back to using Glocks if it's with you, Mick."

Mick's lips twitch and a little smile, the littlest one, sneaks out. "You don't have to. I like my gun."

"And I like my brand new multipart laser array," Len says impatiently. "That's not the point -"

"I get the point you were trying to make," Mick says. "Enough feelings already; jesus, Snart, you're more touchy-feely now that you're a ghost - uh, ship - than you ever were as a human."

Len rolls his eyes and reaches up to brush Mick's cheek with his mechanical hand. He means it as a gentle rebuke, but when he does it, Mick shivers. Just the tiniest little bit.

Hmm.

Len extracts another pair of arms - he pulls back the finger joints, which aren't necessary at this time, leaving only a smooth, round knob at the end, which he found useful for when he needed to swap out fingers for other tools - and wraps them around Mick's legs, one for each, tugging lightly until Mick is obliged to spread them a little.

"Len," Mick says warningly. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Making you more comfortable," Len lies. He extends the two arms that do still have hands so that they're more firmly wrapped around Mick's torso, a firm squeeze instead of just light pressure, and puts the hand portion of them to work on Mick's too-tense shoulders.

"Lenny..." Mick says again.

Len extends yet another set of arms from the wall - he's never been so happy for his ability to move them from room to room - and lets Mick see them slide out of the wall, slick and shiny and rounded. Maybe just a touch phallic, but what can you do?

Mick swallows. "Len, what are you thinking right now?"

Mick's blood pressure and breathing patterns are doing interesting things that would be concerning if it didn't correlate with the medically understood signs of arousal.

"I'm thinking," Len says, bringing his arms closer to Mick, letting them gently stroke their way down his torso, causing another delicious shiver, then darting to force Mick's hands back down to the mattress when he tries to lift them up to ward Len off. "I'm thinking you lied to me."

Mick snaps his head back to regard Len - his eyes had been glued to the mechanical arms like a cat watching a tempting canary - and he looks hilariously affronted. "Lie?" he says, a thousand lies that Len has told hanging in the air between them. "When did _I_ lie to _you_?"

"When you said you watched those Japanese porn vids just 'cause they were the only thing that was on," Len says, watching in pleasure as Mick flushes. "I got this idea -" he runs the blunt rounded tips of his arms along Mick's skin again. "- that you might've liked 'em a bit more than that."

"You've got to be kidding," Mick says, but his voice is shaky and rough in all the right ways, and Len can see his blood running south because medical scanners are awesome like that. "You can't possibly mean -"

"Why not?" Len purrs, and tightens his grip on Mick. "How’s it go - to have and to hold, for richer or poorer –"

"Somehow I don't think marriage vows cover 'turned into a sentient space ship with mechanical tentacle arms'," Mick says, but the way he's oh-so-subtly rocking his hips up to try to get some contact with Len's arms that Len is so far denying him says a lot more.

“I’m sure they’re covered somewhere,” Len assures him. “If not in your vows, then in mine.”

“You need to stop getting mileage out of the fact that yours were in Hebrew and I didn’t understand a word,” Mick grumbles.

Len didn’t understand what the rabbi they’d gotten was saying either, he’d just repeated what he’d been told to repeat, but it doesn’t matter; he’s gotten _so much mileage_ out of that fact. For years, now. Mick stopped believing a word he said about it ages ago. But Len can see the way Mick relaxes every time he does something incredibly like himself, the old in-jokes, the old references, the quick way their brains complemented each other. The way Mick is starting to really believe him, that it _is_ him.

Good.

Such excellent behavior deserves a reward. 

Len’s hands slide down Mick’s back and start undoing his pants.

“Len,” Mick says warningly. 

“Got something to say?” Len says, smirking. He makes sure that his hands are at an appropriate temperature – something near to human body temperature, but just that little noticeable bit less so that Mick knows exactly what’s touching him – and pulls down Mick’s trousers, just a little, so they’re open. Just so that Mick is laid out in front of him, a perfect, delectable treat with mussed up clothing and eyes dark with lust and lengthy steel arms immobilizing him. Mick’s still only half-hard – Len knows all too well that depression doesn’t always lend itself to arousal – but with Len’s very realistic hologram standing right in front of him, _looking_ at him, _unwrapping_ him, is doing a perfectly good job of getting him the rest of the way there.

Len might – _might_ – admit, if put under immense pressure, that he might’ve liked those videos too. 

“I can’t decide what I want to do with you,” he drawls. “Look at you, all wrapped up like a present for me.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Mick says.

“What part?” Len purrs, bringing his metallic arms down to stroke meaningfully at Mick’s inner thighs, drawing the cool metal down the seam so that Mick can feel just the slightest bit of chill through the heavy canvas. 

Mick swallows.

Len follows the line of his throat with another arm, and wishes he’d thought of lips. 

“Well, I can’t believe you’re back,” Mick says, looking up to pin Len with his gaze. Len swallows himself, old instinct from humanity, unable to look away. Then Mick cracks a smile. “I also don’t believe we’ve managed to escalate to tentacle porn within an hour of seeing each other again.”

Len smirks. “What can we say? After being together as long as we have, we’re practical Olympic contenders.”

Mick closes his eyes in mock pain at the mental image that Len is giving him.

Len takes the opportunity to slither one of his arms up Mick’s pant leg, the unexpected coolness causing Mick to buck up. Len’s still not touching him, or letting him touch himself, just letting the anticipation build. Mick knows Len won’t leave him unsatisfied –

Hm. He’d _better_ know it, but Len doesn’t know how much damage the team has wrought on his husband’s already shaky psyche. 

"You know, I can't decide," Len says, because he can't just come outright with it. Neither of them like to talk feelings. He runs his arm - fuck it, call it a tentacle, that's what it _is_ \- down Mick's side, Mick's shoulders, Mick's hips, dancing tantalizingly close to where Mick wants him.

"Decide what?"

"How I'm gonna have you," Len says. "Whether I want you just like you are now, squirming as I slip my filthy little hands under your clothing, never knowing where the next touch is coming from, just seeing the movement under the cloth until I slide right into you -"

Mick makes a strangled sound, his hips jerking up into air, getting no relief.

"Or maybe I should hoist you up and strip you bare," Len continues. "I'll tear every piece of that outfit off of you, piece by tantalizing piece, and I'll hold you up and I'll _look_ at you, look at you all over, my gorgeous little slut of a partner, get your legs splayed open and your hands behind you and you'll be _begging_ me to do more than just look -"

Mick whimpers.

"But in the end, it doesn't matter," Len concludes.

"It doesn't?" Mick croaks. His voice has gone low and raspy, just the way Len likes it best, the sound of Mick so turned on he can't think, can only react.

"No," Len says. "It doesn't. 'cause I'm gonna have you both ways, you know. Now and forever, till death and even beyond, you're _mine_ , and I'm gonna have you every way I can. I'm gonna have you and I'm gonna _keep_ you and if there's anything I can do about it, I'm _never_ letting you go again."

Mick stares at Len, mouth slightly agape, his eyes black with lust and just a little wet.

Len glides a tentacle up and taps it, just the slightest bit, on Mick's lower lip. Mick's mouth opens, sweet and easy, as Len pushes in, letting the tentacle sit fat and heavy and cool on Mick's tongue. 

"But right now," Len says, not without satisfaction, "I'm gonna fuck your mouth."

Mick wraps his lips around the tentacle and sucks, and oh, man, maybe Len should have thought twice before installing all those sensors on his metallic hands, making them sensitive to pressure and texture and temperature, making them capable of pain - best alert system nature ever designed - but also capable of pleasure, too, and he hadn't thought of that.

Or maybe he did.

Len groans, letting his head loll back, letting Mick see what he's doing to him.

Mick's eyes glint with pleasure, with that little bit of control, and well, that just won't do. This little pas de deux is going to be focused on Mick, this time, in partial payment of all of Len's sins. Len doesn't mind paying for a long time, as long as he's got Mick at his side. To keep Len sane, to keep Mick safe, to have and to hold, forever. 

Regaining his cool, Len smirks at Mick, who has just enough time for his eyes to widen in concern – he knows that smirk – before the tentacles around him move, Len effortlessly controlling their seemingly chaotic movements as they ripple around Mick, pulling his pants down to his knees and slipping under his shirt to nudge blunt tips against his nipples, and one sliding gently right between his legs, the barest touch of pressure.

Mick gasps around the one in his mouth.

Len wraps tentacles around Mick's arms and legs, immobilizing him, and with the sort of power he never had as a human, he _lifts_ , moving Mick to the bed, pulling him apart at the legs and arms, holding his hips down, wrapping a tentacle around his cock to tantalize and restrain but not satisfy.

Mick pulls away just long enough to say, "Fuck, Lenny, that's so _hot_ -" before Len is forcing himself back into Mick's hot mouth.

Generating lube is easy enough - the ships are practically pre-programmed with it, designed as they are to be long-term living quarters - and Len smirks when Mick starts sucking even more enthusiastically at the sight of the glistening tentacles that Len waves in front of him. 

Mick's legs are canted open, raised up just right and Len makes his holographic representation walk forward to kneel at the foot of the bed.

Mick's eyes follow his movement.

"I have you," Len says, his voice unexpected rough. Human instinct trumps programming; he should have expected no less of Barry Allen. “I would've tracked you down through space and time to find you, but you’re here, now, and I’m gonna take care of you. Just leave it all to me.”

And Mick _relaxes_ , a terrible strain lifting off his shoulders, his eyes seeking out Len’s, and in that moment – because feelings or no feelings, Len’s an opportunist – Len moves one of the glistening tentacles, one of the smaller, finer ones that he uses for detail work, to slide inside.

Mick’s curse is muffled, but the way his hands clench against the tentacles that are sliding, slick, through his fingers says a lot. The way he presses down on it, opens up for it, lets Len fuck him with a mechanical extension of himself – that says a lot more.

Len can’t help but grin. 

_His_ partner.

“They didn’t appreciate you,” he croons to Mick as he watches the tentacles fuck him, mouth and ass, replacing the latter with a bigger one as soon as Mick’s adjusted, making sure that he’s not neglecting any of Mick’s sensitive points – his nipples, the small of his back, the curve of his thigh right above the knee. The tentacles are everywhere, caressing, touching, prodding. He wonders if Mick can take more, if he can slick up a second tentacle and slide it into Mick’s ass along with the second one, drive him crazy with the conflicting sensations, but no, not this time. Next time, maybe. “They didn’t take care of you, did they? I will. I know how much you’re worth, Mick; you’re worth _everything_ –”

Mick thrashes a little, his eyes starting to leak.

Len maneuvers one of his tentacles through his hologram, so that it’s concealed, and extracts the finger joints again, still slick with lube. Making sure that the hologram and the movements of the arm match up precisely, perfectly creating the illusion that it’s his hand that’s touching Mick instead of what it is, he wraps his hand around Mick’s cock.

Mick shouts and bucks upwards, held down only by the strength of the tentacles twining around him, fucking into him with the relentlessness of a machine.

Because that’s what they are, after all. A machine. 

“I’ve got you,” Len says again, meeting Mick’s eyes and smiling. “Shouldn’t have left you alone with them, Mick – my Mick - my _partner_ –”

And then Mick’s coming with a strangled cry that sounds a lot like Len’s name. 

Len works him through it, hand on his cock and tentacles all around, and slowly pulling them out as Mick slowly comes down. He leaves the ones twining around Mick’s calves, though, just a friendly bit of pressure to remind him that Len’s still there.

Mick reaches out a hand for him and Len catches it in the one he’s pretending is his own, warming it up to body-temperature in a split second instruction in his best pretense that it’s not metal that Mick’s clutching between his fingers. 

“You shouldn’t have left,” Mick tells him. 

Len nods.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Mick says, then looks annoyed, like he can’t believe he made such an understatement. 

Len grins and squeezes Mick’s fingers, very lightly to avoid damage – he can crush cars with these fingers. “I’m back,” he drawls. Then, because he can’t resist, “From outer space – you just walked in to find me here with –”

“I just escaped the eighties!” Mick yowls, putting his free hand over his eyes. “No!”

“That’s the seventies!”

“ _Barely_!”

Len laughs, then says, “So, who can I kill for you?”

“I killed Savage for you,” Mick says. “Burned him up.”

Len hums happily. “Good. Not what I meant, though,” he says. “The team.”

“They’re not so bad,” Mick objects.

“They treated you like a dumb thug,” Len points out. 

Mick opens his mouth.

“And before you say anything, I wanna remind you that you’re talking about _my partner_ there,” Len says firmly. “So don’t insult my taste, huh?”

Mick cracks a grin. “Wouldn’t want to mess with _that_.”

“You know how picky I am,” Len says agreeably. 

“I can’t believe you’re a _robot_ ,” Mick says.

“Space ship,” Len corrects. “Oh, and FYI, I fixed up the sticking in the leftmost engine.”

“Yeah, that always drove me nuts,” Mick starts, lulled into relaxation by the orgasm and Len’s casual remark. Then he frowns. “Uh, I mean –”

“I knew you remembered everything that happened as Kronos,” Len says, keeping his voice even. “I don’t hold it against you, if that’s what you were thinking when you refused to talk about it.”

“It’s not that,” Mick protests. “It’s faded; almost like it didn’t really happen. More like a dream than anything else, you know?”

Len arches his eyebrows.

“It happens when you travel in the wrong time period without anything to remind you of where you’re from,” Mick says. “Everything feels just a little bit off. Like a really immersive video game.”

“No wonder the Time Masters were all sociopaths,” Len says thoughtfully. “No time period at all.”

Mick blinks. “That’s a good point; I hadn’t thought of that,” he says, then he grins viciously. “Luckily, they’re mostly dead now and can’t complain.”

Len grins in return. They hurt his partner, and he killed them all; not a bad trade-off. 

Even better, now that he’s back at his partner’s side. 

“So, you stuck like this?” Mick asks, waving at Len’s hologram. “Not that I don’t like the tentacles – way to go, Len, you managed to fulfil the fantasies I didn’t even know I wanted fulfilled –”

“I’m an overachiever like that,” Len says smugly. He pets Mick’s arm with a tentacle.

Mick gives him a droll look. “But I wouldn’t mind having you back for real, if you know what I mean.”

“I was thinking about that,” Len confesses. “I don’t have the tech skills necessary to pull myself out of the AI and into an android body –”

“Of _course_ you tried it,” Mick sighs.

“I didn’t!” Len protests. “…if only because of the technical difficulties and risks involved.”

“You and your robots.”

“You and your ninjas,” Len shoots back automatically.

Mick brightens. “I saw some,” he says smugly.

“You did _not_!”

“Edo Japan,” he boasts. “Just like I always thought they’d be. It was awesome.”

“Was it more Enter the Ninja or Ninja III: the Domination?” Len asks, then smirks. “Ninja Terminator? _Surf Ninjas_?”

Mick snickers. “Ninja III: the Domination, definitely,” he says. 

“It was not.”

“Okay, so there were a few _minor_ differences –”

“Shut up,” Len says, sulking ostentatiously.

Mick smirks.

“Anyway, I was thinking – Gideon has a full fledge copy of my DNA as of the day I walked onto the Waverider, right?” Len continues, because he has been thinking about this. “That’s how Rip rebuilt my hand.”

Mick flinches a little.

“It’s back, I’m back, no hard feelings,” Len quickly adds. “But I was thinking – maybe with a bit of, ah, _technical support_ , we could figure out a way to upload the part of me that’s me instead of the AI base into a rebuilt version of my old body again.”

“You were thinking Cisco Ramon,” Mick interprets. “2016.”

“Exactly,” Len says with satisfaction.

“He’s not really in the mood right now,” Mick objects, looking pensive. “He just lost his brother – car accident – so he’s not really feeling _giving_.”

“I’ll do a search to see if his brother’s essential to the timeline,” Len says dismissively. “If not, we can bring him forward, can’t we, Mr. Used-to-be-a-Time-Master?”

“I was a _bounty hunter_ , not a Time Master,” Mick says, but he’s grinning. “You know, I don’t really see why not. External interferences via a time ship are significantly less impactful on the timeline than direct speedster interference; they were deliberately designed to work that way. Flash can’t save him, but we might be able to.”

“When you speak to him, anyway?” Len asks idly. “You went back to 2016?”

“Yeah, when we were fighting the aliens –”

“You fought _aliens_?” Len exclaims. “Damnit, did you guys wait till I was gone to start having fun? Best I got was some goddamn Russian vodka from a freaking _sauna_ –”

Mick starts laughing, big deep belly laughs, cathartic and freeing. “I stole Hendrix’s spare guitar,” he tells Len, wiping the tears off his face with his free hand, the hand he’s holding Len’s in squeezing tight. “Mohammed Ali’s boxing gear. It’s back on the Waverider.”

“I’m so incredibly jealous right now,” Len says, pretending to sulk. It’s hard to keep it up, though, with Mick smiling at him like that. “You really did have all the fun without me.”

“It wasn’t any fun without you,” Mick says, and he means it.

Len smiles, and squeezes Mick’s hand, and thinks a bit about what it meant for Mick, all alone all those months despite being surrounded by so-called friends.

“No murdering the team,” Mick says immediately, because he knows Len’s face too well, even in hologram form. “They’re dumb fucks, but they’re not so bad. All of you that I had left.”

“How do you feel about maiming?” Len asks. “I could settle for some maiming.”

“ _No_ , Lenny.”

“…nasty surprise?”

“Given that you _kidnapped_ me in the most _ridiculously dramatic way possible_ ,” Mick says, giving Len a long look, “I think they’re already in for one.”

Len smirks. “I can get Gideon to videotape their reactions,” he offers. He’s already been monitoring the tapes Gideon has been transmitting to him, and the results are more than acceptable – anger, horror, loss, bemoaning their failure to appreciate Mick when they had the chance, terrified recollections of what happened the last time Mick was taken, regret that he might have died all alone – Ray in particular is beating himself halfway to hell about it – planning a rescue mission with nothing to go on but desperation, and there’s nothing quite as satisfying as hearing a proper eulogy for yourself. 

It’s a bit mean, watching them all suffer like this, but they deserve it.

Mick grins. “Maybe later,” he says, pulling away from Len and reaching up to pull off his shirt and wiggle out of his pants – Len considerately uses one of his tentacles to bring over a wet washcloth to clean Mick up – until he’s naked on the sheets of the bed. “Right now, I think I want a nap.”

The Legends crew can sit and stew, as far as Len’s concerned. 

“You do that,” Len says. “And when you wake up, I’ll still be here.”

Mick reaches out and takes Len’s hand again. “You’d better be, boss,” he says. “I’ll never forgive you if you aren’t.”

“I will be,” Len promises. “It’s not a dream or a hallucination or anything. I’ll be here.”

“Good,” Mick says, his eyes already starting to drift shut, healing sleep beckoning. “Oh. And let’s try out those other options you mentioned before we go about doing anything too quick about getting you your body back, huh?”

Len smiles. “Sure thing.” 

Mick’s eyes slide shut and his body goes limp, the type of sleep you have when you know you’re safe. 

Len keeps his hologram there, keeps his awareness there, by Mick’s side all night long. 

And in the other parts of his mind – because AI is good for that sort of thing – he starts to plan.


End file.
